The Nexenta Core Platform marches on with the release of version 3.0 of the OpenSolaris based distribution, based on b134. It has also officially unveiled plans of moving from OpenSolaris to Illumos, the fully open branch of OpenSolaris. It will also now plan on moving to a new userland release. Grab the iso here.

The first time I used nexenta I was a little surprised that it was such a bad dekstop OS since it was based on Ubuntu, and Ubuntu is a very smooth desktop OS. Of course, the desktop is not Nexenta's target audience, but I hope this will change in the future (maybe by collaboration with StormOS).

Another problem is that the distribution would need to integrate many of the Solaris driver management utilities that are found in OpenSolaris, but not in Ubuntu. One big example is the wifi stack.

The first time I used nexenta I was a little surprised that it was such a bad dekstop OS since it was based on Ubuntu, and Ubuntu is a very smooth desktop OS.

tbh I wouldn't say Ubuntu was a particularly smooth desktop OS either. But then that's my personal bias speaking more than impartial fact.

As for Nexenta, I ran CP1 for about 6 months and I really tried to like it but ultimately found it hard to love.
I'm sure the OS has come alone leaps and bounds since v1, but now that FreeBSD supports ZFS and VirtualBox, there is no need for me to run a Solaris derivative any more.